Following the WordCamp event, my wife and I went to one of the best food and wine events we’ve ever attended. It was at a place called One Market, and was put on by The American Institute of Wine & Food. We had lamb starting with the tongue and cheek, working our way back to the leg. Each course was paired with one or two wines from the Zacherle or Fisher labels, and the wine makers were there to talk about each wine and answer our many questions (who knows what a “brick” is in wine making, and why some wines need fewer bricks than others?). It was a beautiful, fancy, entertaining dinner.

When we finished that, we caught a cab over to the Automattic Lounge at Pier 38 to catch part of the WordCamp after party. Talk about a shock to the system. We left a place where lamb was being served to people in suits and fancy dresses who were seated at tables with linens and full silverware sets, and within minutes we were at a party with blaring music and full of geeks, many of who had consumed considerably more alcohol than recommended. We spent a little time saying hi to everyone, having a few laughs at the expense of the imbibed (you know who you are), and I got my picture taken with several people (I’m not sure any of them knew who I was, they just seemed to like posing with someone and getting their picture taken). We left relatively early, around midnight, and headed back to the hotel. I knew from the year before that the developer day was going to be my personal favorite part of the event, and I didn’t want to be falling asleep at the laptop all day.

The following morning I arrived back at the Pier 38 lounge to find that I was the first to arrive for the developer day (I was a few minutes early). Ryan Boren was the next to show, but we ended up having to wait a little longer until someone with keys arrived. I’m not sure people really got the “unconference” thing, as everyone kept wanting to know what was scheduled for when, and where things would be happening. The basic idea is simply “find people that want to discuss what you want to discuss, form a group, and discuss it.” Eventually a group of us formed at one of the tables and began working on WordPress 3.0. I’m sure I can’t name everyone, but I know Dion Hulse, Ryan Boren, Andrew Nacin, Matt Martz, Pete Mall, John Jacoby, and Ptah Dunbar were all there. Dion and I spent several hours on an elusive bug with a rather simple fix, and it was really great to finally get to put faces with the names and handles that I see regularly on IRC, mailing lists, Trac, etc.

After the dev day coding, several of us walked down to Gordon Biersch, had dinner together and tried not to talk about WordPress too much (although Andrew Nacin’s like a machine…you just can’t stop the man!). So, what do you think we would do after a long day of coding? Well, we’re geeks, so we walked to one of the hotels were a few of the guys were staying, went up to their lounge, and started doing some more coding. As a guy who works from home and tends to work only with remote programmers, it was really nice to spend some time with people that understood what I was saying! I’m looking forward to seeing everyone again next year.

Related Posts:

• Google Summer of Code 2010
• The Xavisys WordPress Plugin Framework
• How To Make Your Own WordPress Widget
• WordPress Core vs Canonical Plugins
• WordPress Developer Meeting – July 01, 2009

This year there are a lot of great students and projects. I’m definitely excited to see what happens with all of them. However, I’m most excited about the student that I’m going to be mentoring. Jon Stacey is going to be implementing stream wrappers into the WordPress file API. He did a similar project for Drupal as part of GSoC last year, and this year we were able to woo him over to WordPress.

Not only does the project have great potential, but since stream wrappers were introduced in PHP 5, it will help push WordPress toward PHP 5 as a minimum requirement (which I’m all for). So good luck to Jon and all the 2010 GSoC students.

Related Posts:

• How To Make Your Own WordPress Widget
• WordPress Core vs Canonical Plugins
• The WordPress has-patch marathon
• The Xavisys WordPress Plugin Framework
• WordPress Developer Meeting – July 01, 2009

It was a great idea, and I finally got around to writing one for my own plugins. I built it as an abstract class (and a tiny CSS file) that I extend for each plugin. Here you’ll get to see a quick tour of what the framework does. Let me know in the comments if you’re interested in seeing a walkthrough of how it was built, and feel free to download Efficient Related Posts to see it in action.

Here are some of the things it does:

• Stores plugin settings in a protected variable, making them easily available to all methods.
• Registers the options for the plugin (making sure it works in WPMU and that options.php can handle updates to the options).
• When an update to the plugin is available, it shows a changelog from the currently installed version to the newly available version (whether they’re one version apart or twenty).
  
• Adds an options page for the WordPress plugin settings, complete with a page heading and a Xavisys icon.
• Styles the options page as two columns with meta boxes (similar to the two column dashboard layout).
  
• Adds basic meta boxes to the sidebar of the options page, including one with a donate link, one with a link to the support forums, and one showing the latest news from Xavisys.
  
• It adds links to the plugin row on the plugins page. One link to the support forums and one to the plugin options page.
  
• It adds a dashboard widget with a feed from Xavisys, complete with the Xavisys logo and a way to subscribe via RSS to the Xavisys site.
  
  

It does all this based on variables set in the extending class. For example, the setup for Efficient Related Posts looks something like this:

require_once('xavisys-plugin-framework.php');
class efficientRelatedPosts extends XavisysPlugin {
	protected function _init() {
		$this->_hook = 'efficientRelatedPosts';
		$this->_file = plugin_basename( __FILE__ );
		$this->_pageTitle = __( 'Efficient Related Posts', $this->_slug );
		$this->_menuTitle = __( 'Related Posts', $this->_slug );
		$this->_accessLevel = 'manage_options';
		$this->_optionGroup = 'erp-options';
		$this->_optionNames = array('erp');
		$this->_optionCallbacks = array();
		$this->_slug = 'efficient-related-posts';
		$this->_paypalButtonId = '9996714';
	}
}

Related Posts:

• Google Summer of Code 2010
• 10 Great WordPress Plugins
• How To Make Your Own WordPress Widget
• WordPress Core vs Canonical Plugins
• GPL Themes Get Some Love, Plugins Suffer?

If you want to request a feature, or need support, go to the Efficient Related Posts Support Forum. More information is available on the Efficient Related Posts page.

Related Posts:

• The Problem with Related Post Plugins
• The Xavisys WordPress Plugin Framework
• 10 Great WordPress Plugins
• Manual Related Links
• Efficient Related Posts

If you want to request a feature, or need support, go to the Twitter Widget Pro Forum. For more information, go to the Twitter Widget Pro page.

Related Posts:

• 10 Great WordPress Plugins
• The Xavisys WordPress Plugin Framework
• Twitter Widget Pro
• GPL Themes Get Some Love, Plugins Suffer?
• The Problem with Related Post Plugins

I also added in some links to the WordPress Twitter Widget Pro Support Forum to make it easier for you to ask questions or make suggestions or requests. For more information, go to the Twitter Widget Pro page.

Related Posts:

• 10 Great WordPress Plugins
• The Xavisys WordPress Plugin Framework
• Twitter Widget Pro
• GPL Themes Get Some Love, Plugins Suffer?
• The Problem with Related Post Plugins

Related Posts:

• 10 Great WordPress Plugins
• The Xavisys WordPress Plugin Framework
• Twitter Widget Pro
• GPL Themes Get Some Love, Plugins Suffer?
• The Problem with Related Post Plugins

1. Akismet
2. Simple Trackback Validation
3. Headspace2
4. Clean Slugs
5. Google XML Sitemaps
6. Twitter Widget Pro
7. WP Super Cache
8. Sociable
9. Subscribe to Comments
10. Twitter Tools

Akismet

Akismet is the only useful plugin that ships with WordPress (so to speak). It requires that you sign up for an API key, but it’s well worth it. Comment spam is a huge problem on any site that allows comments. The WordPress Akismet plugin checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen. It’s actually quite effective, more than most (if not all) the other comment spam plugins I’ve tried.

Simple Trackback Validation

Fighting spam is the never ending task of anyone running a site that allows user content of any kind. Akismet does a great job of handling the comment spam, but Simple Trackback Validation fills in the gaps and handles trackbacks. Simple Trackback Validation Plugin performs a simple but very effective test on all incoming trackbacks in order to stop trackback spam. Basically, it makes sure that the page claiming to be posting a trackback actually links to the page it’s posting that trackback to.

Headspace2

WordPress is pretty good with search engine optimization right out of the box, just by turning on permalinks. However, there’s definitely plenty of room for improvement. HeadSpace2 is an all-in-one meta-data manager that allows you to fine-tune the SEO potential of your site. Headspace will help you to better handle your tags/keywords, meta descriptions, and it does a great job of cleaning up and customizing your title tag. No longer do you need a bunch of conditionals in your title tag. A simple wp_title(”) will suffice, and the rest can be handled by Headspace2.

Clean Slugs

Another plugin that will help you get a little better search engine optimization. Joost’s Clean Slugs plugin looks for and removes more than 650 “stop words” from your post or page title when the slug is created. These are words that most search engines ignore because they are inconsequential, so removing them will help your raking. Unlike all the other plugins on this list, this plugin can’t be downloaded from the WordPress.org repository. To get this plugin, simply sign up for Joost’s WordPress Newsletter.

Google XML Sitemaps

While it’s true that search engines can spider or crawl your site by following links, having a proper XML sitemap allows you to make sure that every post/page is properly indexed, as well as letting you specify a priority level for each. This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

Twitter Widget Pro

Twitter offer javascript widgets that display your latest tweets, but there are a couple problems. First, you need to be able to modify your theme or put the code into a text widget. Secondly, since it’s javascript, search engines don’t see the content. Twitter Widget Pro is a widget that properly handles twitter feeds, including @username and link parsing. It supports displaying profiles images, and even lets you control whether to display the time and date of a tweet or how log ago it happened (about 5 hours ago, etc). It does all this as a server-side widget, so the content can all be parsed by search engines. Requires PHP5.

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly, reduce CPU/memory usage, and lessen database strain. If you have a high-traffic WordPress site, this is absolutely necessary.

Sociable

Social marketing is a hot topic and many have found that it’s incredibly successful. There are a few plugins for WordPress that will help you with this. Add This, Share This, and Sociable are the most popular, and I think Sociable is the best. It’s the only one that allows all content to be loaded from your site, no scipts or images to load from some other site. The reason this is so important to me is that I don’t ever want my site to load slowly because of a different site. Sociable automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites!

Subscribe to Comments

Getting people to comment on your posts can be a challenge. Even more difficult is getting people to come back to the same post and continue a discussion. Subscribe to Comments is a robust plugin that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries. The plugin includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification e-mail address!

Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. The only part of it that I use is the ability to automatically notify Twitter of new posts. The problem is that it prefaces all these Tweets with “New blog post:” and this text isn’t customizable. Additionally, it uses tinyurl to shorten the URL for the post, and I would prefer that it let me use something like SnipUrl which lets me track the number of clicks. Still, the fact that it’s all automatic saves a lot of time for me, especially on sites like Web Developer News where people other than me post articles on a regular basis.

Related Posts:

• The Xavisys WordPress Plugin Framework
• Twitter Widget Pro
• GPL Themes Get Some Love, Plugins Suffer?
• The Problem with Related Post Plugins

To read more about how to use the shortcodes and to download the plugin, go to the Twitter Widget Pro page. For support, go to the Twitter Widget Pro Forum

Related Posts:

• 10 Great WordPress Plugins
• The Xavisys WordPress Plugin Framework
• Twitter Widget Pro
• GPL Themes Get Some Love, Plugins Suffer?
• The Problem with Related Post Plugins

Xavisys Website Development

Start with just a link exactly as you would make it for any other purpose, and make sure to give the link an id so that we can use that to apply our styles:

<a href="http://xavisys.com" title="Professional WordPress Development" id="xavisys-logo">Xavisys Website Development</a>

That’s all the (X)HTML you’ll need to make your background image clickable. Your link should look something like this: Xavisys Website Development

So, how can we make a background image a clickable link? It turns out it can be done with a clever CSS trick. Let’s get started by adding the background image and make the link the same size as the image (so you can see the whole image). Since an anchor tag isn’t a block level element, we need to force it to display as “block” so that we can specify the size:

#xavisys-logo {
	background-image:url(/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/email_logo.gif);
	display:block;
	height:58px;
	width:200px;
}

At this point it should look something like this: Xavisys Website Development

Now all we need to do is hide the text. This can be done using “text-indent” and indenting the text completely off the screen like this:

#xavisys-logo {
	background-image:url(/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/email_logo.gif);
	display:block;
	height:58px;
	text-indent:-9999px;
	width:200px;
}

And the finished product looks like this: Xavisys Website Development

And there you have it – a quick CSS trick with clean markup that turns your background images into clickable links. The best thing is, these don’t adversely affect your SEO and can even be easily used inside of header tags if needed!

Related Posts:

• Becoming a Freelance Web Developer/Designer
• New Web Development Resource Launched
• Free Template: Minimalist
• Free Template: BlueBox
• Dilbert